Political Polarization and Mechanisms of Direct Democracy

• In Event: Institutional Performance and Policy Effectiveness across Regimes

Abstract

In the past 30 years, governments and opposition parties in democratic regimes have increasingly used mechanisms of direct democracy (MDD) to promote legal changes that range from constitutional to simple policy reforms (Altman 2011; Qvortrup 2018). Yet, a careful examination of relevant data reveals that there is an important variation in the scope and use of such mechanisms across democracies. This is surprising because extant research has found that MDDs increase the sense of political efficacy (Menezes 2014) thereby increasing political participation. Why do some democracies use mechanisms of direct democracy (MDD) while others do not? In contrast to extant research on the determinants of MDDs, we argue here that variation in support of MDDs across democracies is driven by the scope of ideological polarization in the political system. Our argument suggests that ideological polarization diminishes the probability of achieving consensus between incumbent and opposition parties through existing institutional arenas. Therefore, they have incentives to promote MDDs to push important policy initiatives. A time-series-cross-sectional (TSCS) dataset of observed democracies from 1990 to 2019 is used to estimate Within-between random effects (REWB), Two-way fixed effects (TWFE), and Mundlak models that support our main hypothesis.

Authors

• Sergio Bejar, San Jose State U. & CIDE-Mexico

• Juan A. Moraes, Universidad de la República